Monthly Archives: December 2009

…Since Muslims took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, every attack on a commercial airliner has been committed by foreign-born Muslim men with the same hair color, eye color and skin color. Half of them have been named Mohammed.

An alien from the planet “Not Politically Correct” would have surveyed the situation after 9/11 and said: “You are at war with an enemy without uniforms, without morals, without a country and without a leader — but the one advantage you have is they all look alike. … What? … What did I say?”

The only advantage we have in a war with stateless terrorists was ruled out of order ab initio by political correctness.

And so, despite 5 trillion Americans opening laptops, surrendering lip gloss and drinking breast milk in airports day after day for the past eight years, the government still couldn’t stop a Nigerian Muslim from nearly blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day.

The “warning signs” exhibited by this particular passenger included the following:

His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

He’s Nigerian.

He’s a Muslim.

His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

He boarded a plane in Lagos, Nigeria.

He paid nearly $3,000 in cash for his ticket.

He had no luggage.

His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Two months ago, his father warned the U.S. that he was a radical Muslim and possibly dangerous.

If our security procedures can’t stop this guy, can’t we just dispense with those procedures altogether? What’s the point exactly?…

Democrats are counter-attacking critics of Barry’s response to the recent unpleasantness on a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. They point to the fact that the Bush administration released Gitmo inmates to Saudi Arabia who then turned up in Yemen and are almost certainly behind the underpants bomber.

The Democrats are quite right to criticize Bush who came out for the closing of Gitmo.

It’s now abundantly clear that Bush, the “compassionate conservative,” was infected with the political correctness of sucking up to Muslims who supposedly adhere to, in his words, a “religion of peace.”

In recent interviews, Dick Cheney makes clear that he argued for a more clear-headed, if politically incorrect, policy of toughness which held that it is dangerous to close Gitmo just to appease the international pacifist left that still claims that the Gitmo terrorists are really peaceful shepherds who were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Cheney’s statement:

…As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation—the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war…

…President Obama said the following: “As the plane made its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body, setting off a fire.” (my emphasis) The language is that of courtroom legalese, carefully indicating that a suspect is only “allegedly” guilty of anything, until such time as a jury is convinced by a trial that he was indeed the party responsible for the crime committed.

But as the world knows, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was indeed very guilty, and only because a Dutch filmmaker sitting near him interceded and subdued him, helping put out the fire at the same time, was the plot unsuccessful. Rather than treat the culprit as a foreign national who became converted in London to the doctrines of radical Islam by mullahs at his local mosque, evidently the decision has been made to treat him as a defendant in a criminal case, with a subsequent trial in which his guilt is not to be prejudged. Although he is a foreign national, evidently he will be treated as if he were an American citizen.

Perhaps that is why at present, the government has not been able to obtain necessary DNA samples from him, since Abdulmutallab clearly does not want to voluntarily acquiesce in giving a sample to the FBI. Coercion and rough treatment, including serious interrogation about the involvement of others, could be used against the government in any ensuing trial…

…later in his statement, President Obama, while pledging to “use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us,” continued to say that the quick action taken on the plane to disable the potentially dangerous bomb from detonating showed “that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist.” (my emphasis)…

Dan Riehl on the current Secretary of Homeland Security’s loony imcompetence:

If Barack Obama wants to convince America he takes the “protect and defend” portion of his oath of office seriously, it’s well past time for Janet Napolitano to go.

Given the lowlights of Janet Napolitano’s brief — though perhaps too long — career at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), she appears to be a woman-caused disaster in the making for Obama. Recent statements by Napolitano on the Sunday news talk shows are at least the third strike for the secretary. One has to wonder how many strikes she’ll be given before her politics and focus, if not her actual incompetence, result in al-Qaeda successfully striking America at home.

This is a woman with a mindset that suggests Islamic terrorism doesn’t actually exist…

…Napolitano made the rounds of the nation’s talk shows [on Sunday]. In the aftermath of the recent incident, she claimed “the system worked.”

…Instead of being honest and telling us that their plan is to make health care worse and more expensive — but fairer! — liberals have recently begun claiming that providing universal health care will actually save money. Overnight, they went from wailing about basic human needs being “more important than bombs” to claiming: “Our plan will be cheaper!”

Hmmm, I didn’t make any notes to debate the manifestly insane points. But I’m pretty sure that extending full medical benefits to 30 million people who don’t currently have them — 47 million once the federal health commission rules that illegal aliens are covered — will not be less expensive than the current system.

You can say — mistakenly — that the liberals’ plan is more compassionate. You can say — also incorrectly — that it will be fairer. On no set of facts can you say it will be cheaper.

Democrats keep citing the Congressional Budget Office’s “scoring” of their bills as if that means something.

The CBO is required to score a bill based on the assumptions provided by the bill’s authors. It’s worth about as much as a report card filled out by the student himself.

Democrats could write a bill saying: “Assume we invent a magic pill that will make cars get 1,000 miles per gallon. Now, CBO, would that save money?”

The CBO would have to conclude: Yes, that bill will save money.

Among the tricks the Democrats put into their health care bills for the CBO is that the government will collect taxes for 10 years, but only pay out benefits for the last six years. Will that save money? Yes, the CBO says, this bill is “deficit neutral”!

But what about the next 10 years and the next 10 years and the next 10 years after that? Will the health care plan continually pay benefits only in the last six years of every 10-year period? I think their plan assumes we’ll all be dead from global warming in a decade…

…What Barack Obama advocates is as old as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, the agenda of the classical dêmos and Roman turba.

It is why the French Revolution emphasized égalité and fraternité, while the Founding Fathers instead championed the freedom of the individual from the despotism of the state. In short, equality of result doctrine ignores the role of markets, of skills, of tragedy itself that renders some of us ill, others in perfect health, some born gifted, others less so, some evil by nature, others good, and instead promises that the state can even us all out through its power of material redistribution. Give us all the same amount of money and perks at the end of the day, and then utopia reigns under the benevolent watch of Ivy-League professors and organizers…

…I still believe the American genius, for all its original sins (and slavery was a great sin), lies in a combination of an essential optimism and an essential pessimism about human nature so articulated by the nation’s founders as to make self-correcting renewal the nation’s core identity.

It might be a truth self-evident that all men are created equal and have a right to pursue happiness, but not so evident as to dispense with a system of checks and balances designed to spur the correction over time of the kinds of prejudice that flout professed equality of opportunity.

Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable.

Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term “social science” to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels distinguished their own brand of socialism as “scientific socialism.” By the 20th century, all sorts of notions wrapped themselves in the mantle of “science.”

“Global warming” hysteria is only the latest in this long line of notions, whose main argument is that there is no argument, because it is “science.” The recently revealed destruction of raw data at the bottom of the global warming hysteria, as well as revelations of attempts to prevent critics of this hysteria from being published in leading journals, suggests that the disinterested search for truth– the hallmark of real science– has taken a back seat to a political crusade…

…Shortly after the leaked documents from Britain’s Climatic Research Unit hit the Internet, there appeared in the European press the news that Danish prostitutes had sportingly offered their services for free to the warm-mongers at the Copenhagen conference. I resisted comment for a week—in part because, while a generous gift, it seemed unlikely to be taken up. For one thing, it’s far harder to “hide the decline” when you’re in a Danish bordello than at the Climatic Research Unit. For another, you have to pay extra if you want a second girl to come in and “peer-review” your submission…

Nor are we allowed to make jokes about Rajendra Pachauri. I always love those experts who go on TV and say you can’t pronounce on this subject unless you’re a bona fide climatologist. Dr. Pachauri, the head honcho of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a graduate of the Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. He’s not a climatologist but a railroad engineer. So, if he ever avails himself of a free half-hour with a Copenhagen hooker, I’m sure, like the Bombay to Cochin express, he’ll pull out on time…

…”Anthropogenic global warming” will go the way of its predecessors, having achieved what was meant for it, in its season: the extortion of huge amounts of money by the parasites clustered around all the existing environmentalist spigots; the sinking of new bungholes into the public accounts; the creation of new big-brotherly bureaucracies to feed new vested interests; and, untold riches and prestige for the “settled scientists” who work the system for patronage.

But then it will be replaced with a new environmental scare narrative.

The parties are already working on “acidification of the oceans”; there were loose ends from Rio ’92 on “biological diversity”; and there will always be fresh water supply issues to play with. The threat from asteroids was briefly considered, then dismissed: too hard to blame that on the free market. But the activists will come up with something, for their livelihoods depend upon it. And as the world’s climate is constantly changing, and has been doing for the past 4.54 billion years, “climate change” itself will provide new opportunities.

For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the “global warming” scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those “hacked” documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseuses in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting “the right results.” This is by its nature an issue for the criminal courts…

… the results of burning carbon are in doubt and the causes are in dispute. The recent publication of hacked e-mails among global warming advocates showing a clear effort to obscure the truth was a stunner to some, but not to those who knew there was a major controversy about this all along.

In this case, what on earth are we doing seeking to drastically change man’s activities on the planet in this quixotic campaign? Why are we seeking to turn industry upside down in the cause of something that may not even be real?

Maybe because the real goal of the climate change elites is not to save anyone from anything but to have as much social control as possible. Just as the real goal of Marxism was to elevate the power of the Marxists, possibly the real goal of climate change champions is to elevate their status in the world.

Karl Marx was a demon sent from hell, but he said a mouthful when he said that “all history is the history of class struggle.” Maybe what we are seeing now is class struggle between the academics and bureaucrats and the businesspeople and oil people and utility people. Maybe that’s what this recent tomfool notion of declaring CO2, a life-giving gas, a dangerous pollutant is. If the government can have a right to control CO2 emissions, it can control every aspect of life everywhere. This is a recipe for blowing up the Constitution. In the name of a goal which may be unrelated to carbon dioxide emissions, which may not even be a real target, which may be a wholly specious goal, we are considering giving government control over our lives beyond what would have been considered conceivable just a few months ago…

Ron Radosh on the leftist “historian” Howard Zinn and his Hollywood acolytes:

In 1997, Matt Damon played the part of a janitor who turned out to be not only a math wizard, but one of the most brilliant men you could find anywhere. Trying to impress an arrogant Harvard student, who thought he knew everything, Damon’s character quotes from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. He tells the Harvard kid and a psychiatrist at the hospital he works at that “you’re surrounding yourself with all the wrong fuckin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll fuckin’ knock you on your ass.”

A few years later, HBO’s “The Sopranos” had a Columbus Day episode. Tony’s kid informs him that they don’t celebrate it at school, because Columbus was a practitioner of genocide against the Indian natives in the new land. When Tony asks him where he got that from, he tells him it was from their school textbook , Zinn’s People’s History.

…Of course, [The History Channel’s show on Zinn] defenders say in advance, “the lunatic right will howl to the heavens after seeing ‘liberal Hollywood’ perform the words of labor radicals, anti-racists, feminists and socialists.” So all who might pay attention to critics, be forewarned by Dave Zirin at HuffPost, you are part of the “lunatic right.” I mean, who else would dare criticize this series? Indeed, to criticize this show is like Nazi “book-burning.” Our country, Zirin writes, “is “dedicated to historical amnesia,” and those in power fear our radical past. “We need to rescue the great battles for social justice from becoming either co-opted or simply erased from the history books. Our children don’t learn about the people who made the Civil Rights Movement.” I wonder what school Zirin went to. It seems at times that is all they learn about, as everyone who has kids in school well know.

…the audience will hear Josh Brolin reading from Dalton Trumbo’s anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun. I do not have the video, and hence do not know what the narration says as an introduction. But I am certain we will not hear how Trumbo wrote this and had it published during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact from 1939 to 1941, when Trumbo and his fellow Communist Party members abandoned their once proud anti-fascism, and proclaimed that Nazi Germany was a benign power, and that the enemy of “the people” was Franklin D. Roosevelt and imperial Britain, who were ganging up on all the European powers, like Germany and its Soviet ally, who wanted peace and an end to war.

Nor will it tell the audience of how once the Nazis invaded Soviet Russia on June 22 of 1941, Trumbo withdrew his own book from circulation, took the plates from the publisher, and made it unavailable. A book preaching pacifism would interfere with the need to call for arms against [Nazi Germany].